Of the 25 most populated cities in the United States, San Francisco is the only city that does not have direct helicopter access to area hospitals. One helipad, located in the southeast corner of San Francisco on a highly polluted site known as the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, is the safest landing pad for emergency medical helicopters.
"You don't have a heliport to major trauma centers and that's a travesty," said Aviation Consultant Dan Gargas. Attempts to build heliports within the last 12 years have been directed through Gargas. Members of the imposed community prevented all, Gargas said, mainly because of noise concerns.
According to the 1998 Profile of Injury in San Francisco released by the Trauma Foundation, 6,182 injured San Franicsco residents were hospitalized. Of those, 751 were a result of motor vehicle accidents, second only to injurious falls. The exact number of those injured being transported by helicopters was unavailable, though helicopter activity on the shipyard ranges between zero and five landings per week.
"We're talking people in desperate need of medical services and transplants of organs," Linehan said. "Time is of the essence."
In a community where the spoken promise and a signed contract are interchangeable, advocates are seething over the latest perceived breach of trust by city agencies. Slightly stronger than a verbal promise, a Memorandum of Understanding was drafted between the Hunter's Point Community First Coalition and San Francisco Police Department in 1997 which defined SFPD activities on the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard. In the fall of 2002, advocates learned the SFPD had assumed authority and granted the Department of Public Health jurisdiction. Advocates saw this as an act that went against the MOU agreement.
"These paper rules are not worth the paper they are written on if no one pays attention to them," said Chris Shirley of ARC Ecology. "And there's no way to remind yourself that they exist. In other words, if it happened two or three years ago, and a new police chief comes in completely ignorant of it... there's no mechanism to tell him. So these safeguards fall apart. And that's what the helicopter pad demonstrates so clearly," Shirley said.
This is a microcosm of a larger, long-standing frustration advocates in Bayview Hunters Point have had with city agencies when it comes to controlling neighborhood policies. Resentment has accumulated from seemingly forgotten promises made to the community by agencies such as the Navy and PG&E; now the SFPD and DPH.
"DPH...made it sound like it was a done deal," said Maurice Campbell of the Community First Coalition. "Well it's not a done deal. If they want to do this, they need to bring all the parties together. Which is also the community."
Little interest was expressed during community outreach for the helipad development, said SFPD Sergeant Dan Linehan, naming ARC Ecology as the exception.
Department of Public Health Trauma Systems Coordinator Kate Garay said she was informed by the SFPD that the helipad at Hunters Point was available for emergency medical landings.
"Now that DPH is being made aware of the problem, we are concerned," Garay said. "We are doing everything possible to ensure that there is no negative environmental impact and we are doing due diligence to rectify the problem."
Prior to the closing of the SFPD Helicopter division, emergency medical helicopters regulated by DPH were landing on sub-standard, litter-strewn platforms. At times, locked gates separated the waiting ambulances from patients arriving in helicopters. In 2001, a DPH release addressed the issue. According to the City and County of San Francisco Trauma Care and System Plan of 2001, "an unlicensed, ad-hoc helicopter landing site at Pier 94-96 is used on an emergency basis, but the lack of security, poor access conditions, and additional transport time via ground to the trauma center adds risk to trauma patients and emergency medical providers."
Though landing on a toxic Superfund site is not ideal, Garay notes that the overall conditions are better. Benefits include continuous supervision by the Police department, landing lights and a windsock. The optimal place, Garay said, would be atop the hospital to which the patient was being transferred.
That the helipad is close to Highways 280 and 101 is a desirable trait. And with area population density ranging from 15,001 to 53,000 people per square mile, the industrial nature of Hunters Point facilitates less negative-impact on the overall population of San Francisco.
"This is a good place for it. It's underutilized land," said 44-year-old Richard Annim, who spent 4 years working on the shipyard as a craftsman. Though many were unaware of helicopters landing in the area, community consensus in Bayview and Hunter's Point differs from the rest of San Francisco. Additional clamor, it seems, is tolerable when a person's life is in jeopardy.
"We have noise as it is. If it's for a good cause, I don't see anything wrong with it," said life-long Bayview resident Donald Seastrunk. The characteristics that make the shipyard a desirable place to land helicopters are the same traits advocates have been working to change. When environmental cleanup of the shipyard is complete, a task spurred into motion in part by ARC Ecology and the Community First Coalition, this abandoned land will be converted into prime real estate. Per capita annual income currently hovers between $7,562 and $20,982. Hopes are this development will increase income once residential and commercial buildings are built on the shipyard.
The Third Street Lightrail, currently under construction, aims to bring more people into the area and decrease highway traffic and air pollution, another point of contention with advocates.
"As a resident and an activist I have a lot of concerns," said Karen Pierce of the Health and Environmental Assessment Task Force. "Number one, we have problems with dust that we don't need to add any other way to have dust in the air. And even though they have designed a concrete slab that's supposed to be large enough that it won't blow up dust, how do you have a helicopter without dust? We still don't know what's out there in the dust, because the Navy hasn't told us yet."
The rotor downwash, dust a helicopter kicks up during takeoff and landing on this polluted land, is a concern to some. According to the Memorandum of Understanding between community advocates and the SFPD, helicopter activity was limited to, among other things, a helicopter with a rotor diameter of approximately 35 feet. The rotor length of helicopters currently using the helipad has increased to 42 feet long, and Linehan estimates the current 240-by-300-foot helipad will support a helicopter with a rotor diameter of 48 feet.
"We're not under any obligation to have a MOU with the Community First Coalition," Linehan said.
Chris Shirley of ARC Ecology doesn't consider the downwash to be a health hazard. Instead, she sees the agencies disregard of past promises a potential future problem.
"The basic idea is that in allowing the helicopters and the police department facilitating the DPH to use the helipad circumvented all of the safeguards that were put in place to protect public health," said Chris Shirley, who helped to write the original agreement.
"Nobody at CFC wants to see people to die," CFC member Maurice Campbell said. "That's not it. However...the community got rolled over. All the discussions that took place some time ago, nothing was ever kept between the police and the community."
Most objections, however, stem from the sentiment that the hard work advocates have put into safeguarding residents from agencies in this industrialized and polluted community has once again been superceded to accommodate everyone but them."The question was why does it have to be in my backyard?" Linehan said of the CFC's sentiment. "And the answer is this is the only helipad."